By: Max Neumeyer
In the wake of Facebook, the overexposing social media site, rose the popular photo sharing app Snapchat. It seems that with Facebook and similar social sites, everything you put online will be there for good. Hence the popular iPhone and Android app, which deletes your pictures after you send them, gives people the privacy that just doesn’t seem to exist anymore. But is Snapchat really deleting all of your photos? Digital forensic examiner Richard Hickman says otherwise. According to Hickman, all it takes is a few hours (5 or 6 to be exact) and knowing the right places to look. Contrary to popular belief, Snapchats are not being deleted and are merely renamed and hidden in users’ phones. Although finding the snaps is no easy task, Hickman has published his methods online and offers his services for $500. At the moment he has only found out how to uncover snaps on Android phones; however he is currently working on the iPhone. Snapchat has recently released a statement saying that they never meant for snaps to be deleted off of phones, they merely delete all snaps from their internal servers. They also cited their privacy policy which claims that users send all snaps at their own risk.

It will be interesting to see how people react to the news in the next few weeks. Part of the novelty of Snapchat was that a user could send any photo (no matter how racy) and not have to worry about that photo becoming public. This new development sends any solace of privacy to the wayside, basically eliminating the sole purpose of the Snapchat application.

By: James Carven

Due to the tragic events of the Boston Marathon Bombings, there has been a lot of talk throughout the Boston tech community regarding the debate on whether technology and privacy can co-exist. Technology played an integral role in identifying the Boston Marathon suspects through both social media and a new facial recognition software called 3VR. It was nearly impossible to sign onto your Twitter or Facebook account and not see the now infamous picture of the Tsarnaev brothers walking through the crowd with black backpacks on. A few years ago, the process of identifying these individuals would have taken months, but with this new facial recognition software it took a matter of minutes. According to 3VR engineers, their software can pick out parts of the face, nose, eyes, and shape of cheek and create a composite match. After creating this match the software scans a database full of millions of faces and tells you who this person is. This software was clearly extremely vital in finding the Marathon bombing suspects, but it also brought up the ongoing debate on whether or not technology and privacy can co-exist.

Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito stated earlier this year that “new technology may provide increased convenience, but that is all at the expense of our privacy.” It is rather scary that there are surveillance photos out there checking our every move and with one click of the mouse they can determine who we are, where we are from, etc. Allesandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University did an experiment where he took 100 students on campus and within minutes he was able to identify who they were and where they were from by using facial recognition and was also able to obtain social security numbers of these students. Again, it is rather alarming that this professor is able to obtain social security numbers from nothing but a photograph. The government has passed a few bills recently that gave consumers greater control over how their personal data is used on the internet. Throughout the next few years the hope is that the government will be tackling this issue head on by passing strict bills giving us more privacy within the technology space. At some point we need to take accountability and become more aware of the information we are putting up on the internet as well.

By: Jamien Jones

Information gathering within the technical staffing world is, as with most areas in life a crucial part of our job. The knowledge about the companies we’re working with and the candidates we are placing gives us the advantage we need to be able to complete the deals we strive towards. However, we are human and during the information gathering process not all of it is well, processed.  Even though we might like to think nothing gets passed us, (myself included) studies show that on average, many of the things that our minds our processing on a daily basis gets tossed away.

Selective Attentiveness, as show in the video which I added to this blog is something that is funny if you think about it, but scary to see that we can miss so much that is right in front of our eyes. It shows us that many of our daily activities require our full attention to one thing at a time, which causes us to potentially miss important information that could be easily accessed.  This could be a big problem to us,  although we have many tools to aid us in the prevention of this.

Yesware, a company based in Boston helps sales people close deals by tracking the efficiency of email communication with our clients, and candidates.  This products lets the user know from and email standpoint  how many emails were sent, when and where they’ve been open, and it connects your gmail calendar with Salesforce.com, both of which we use to set up and build the relationships we strive for.  You can see the benefit of this because more information is never a bad thing and there are many positive benefits that come along with it. Other companies such as Baydin, Followup.cc., and Appmesh are providing similar products, and from what I read they look like something businesses are really trying to use .  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

            Recently Mozilla Firefox released a web based OS called Firefox OS. It was not released to the general public but developers were able to get their hands on a few thousand handsets to begin developing apps.

            Firefox OS is a Linux-based open source operating systems for smartphones and tablets. It is designed to allow HTML5 applications to communicate directly with the device’s hardware using Javascript. The project proposal was to “pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone OS for the open web in order to find the gaps that keep developers from being able to build apps that are in every way equals of native apps built for the iPhone and Android.

            As the software stack is entirely HTML5, there are already a large number of developers that could start building apps with little to no training. The phones won’t make their way to the United States until 2014, initially they will be released in Europe and Central America and they will be cheap, less than one hundred dollars. The goal here is to eliminate the “what came first, the chicken or the egg” situation that has been hold other operating systems back from competing with iOS and Android. Simply people won’t buy the phones because there are not as many apps, and developers won’t make the apps because people won’t buy them.

            Currently the most popular example of a web based OS is Chrome OS, which runs on Google’s Chromebooks.

            There are many pros with a web based OS. First, since the user’s data and applications are in the cloud tasks like software updates and backing up data are eliminated. This also gets rid of the fear of loss of data due to damaged or lost equipment, moving to new hardware would be as simple as logging in. There is one huge flaw with these operating systems, if internet connection is lost; the hardware becomes nothing more than an expensive paper weight.

            For the immediate future it looks like iOS and Android will remain on top, but soon there could be a new competitor and a need to find developers for Firefox OS.

By: Laura Goldberg

On April 1st 2013, Talener Boston welcomed a new team with open arms. Lead by the fearless Ben Hayes, I was asked to follow him into the uncharted territory of mobile development. Never one to back down from a challenge, I accepted. As our team and client base grew (and continues to grow) I began to fully understand the complexities of Mobile Development. But, what exactly can you build for a mobile device? I wasn’t exactly sure and I knew for sure the rest of the office was also not up to date with their mobile knowledge so I decided to present my current event on mobile development and the different types of things you can create for them.

Mobile development can be broken down into two sections: mobile web and native applications. Native applications are applications that are built in Android or iOS, depending upon the platform. Native apps can be easily distinguished because you can download them from an app store and they live on your phone. Mobile web is built to be seen in a browser and is developed with HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. The invention of responsive design has made it easier than ever to create. You can now develop one website, one time and it able to be viewed no matter the platform you view it from.

So why use one over the other?
If you are going to develop a native application, it is probably because you want your users to be able to access the content and interactivity (think Temple Run). They also allow for more access to your phone. You can use a mobile app to sync your calendar or add contacts to your phone. They are also normally able to hold more data and can be more easily personalized to the individual user.
For the mobile web if you have lots of constantly changing information, this would be the way to go. They can be updated and tweaked easily and now with the invention of responsive design they can be viewed on multiple browsers without having to change the code. They are much cheaper to create, and it is easier to share and find.

So while each have their perks, it just depends on how you want your target market to be using the application. So the next time you know someone who is deciding between a native app and the mobile web, you will be able to assist them. Now go forth and be mobile!

This interesting video is about, “the surprising truth about what motivates us.”

The basic belief is two things:

1) if we reward something, we get more of what we want

2) if we punish something, we get less of what we want

There was a study done on this, and the result was interesting. For mechanical (physical tasks), this incentive worked. However, for cognitive tasks, this resulted in poor performance. So basically, for simple straight forward tasks, the results were great. When a task gets more complicated, the incentives don’t work. Money is a motivator, under certain conditions- if you don’t pay someone enough, there’s no motivation. The key is to pay them enough to not worry about money anymore, and this leads to autonomy (self-directed), mastery (get better at specific things), and purpose. Essentially, the profit motive must be tied into the purpose motive to maximize work. The overall message this video is trying to convey, is that we can build organizations and work places that make us better off, but we could also make the world just a little bit better.